LAY­ING THE GROUND­WORK

Bendis on the other Net­flix shows

Dare­devil owes much to your stint on the book with Alex Maleev, and you are also largely re­spon­si­ble for mak­ing Luke Cage a sig­nif­i­cant char­ac­ter again…

I didn’t cre­ate Dare­devil and I cer­tainly stood on the shoul­ders of cre­ators like Frank Miller and Klaus Jan­son. I’m proud that we didn’t rip them off as we did our own thing, so when I see things on the show that were lit­er­ally shots from our work, I’m flat­tered. If any­thing, I’m just a part of the DNA stew of that show. What do you make of the cast­ing of Mike Colter as Luke Cage?

It’s as­ton­ish­ing. That was one where I was like, “How are they go­ing to pull that off?” In my opin­ion, his cast­ing is as prom­i­nent a home run as Robert Downey Jr was as Iron Man.

Not to pat my­self on the back but Quake (Skye) is such a ma­jor part of Agents Of SHIELD now, and Maria Hill is such a big part of the cin­e­matic uni­verse, so I’m very happy to have con­trib­uted th­ese strong fe­males to the Mar­vel cin­e­matic land­scape.